That was the cry of my daughter for over 20 minutes! As we were in the front yard, I think all my neighbors must have heard. What made her so sad, you might be asking? Here is the backstory.
As the weather was nice and we had to plant our flower garden, I figured I’d take her out and I would do it. She had been diligently helping because she wanted to ‘earn’ a bike ride (another lesson for another day). After what seemed like a long time for her, I finally came up with the bright idea that I could let her ride her bike on the side walk, as our block only has three homes, while I still continued my gardening – allowing us time to both do what we wanted. That was working out relatively ok as I still had to get up every few minutes to help her push off.
As I continued planting, one of the flower broke off, and I had another bright idea: I should give her the pretty flower (I should have really thought this one through). I proceeded to give her the flower, she asked what was the reason – there was none, except it was pretty and I thought she’d like it. She loved it. She tried to stick it in her bike handle and every where she could think of, and it kept blowing off and falling to the ground.
That’s when the wailing started – I am so sad! Complete with tears, a runny nose and every thing else.
I was tempted to get mad, and I almost did. Until I remembered my own hissy fit last week that lasted most of the week. Instead of getting mad, I took a deep breath, scooped her up and asked her what had made her sad. The reason had not changed, her flower wouldn’t stick to her bike. I picked her up, wiped her now very icky face, kissed her cheek and asked if she wanted frozen mango lemonade, which I then made.
I’m not sharing this with you for the parent of the day award. I’m sharing with you to remind you that we all have our emotions, even 4 year olds. Sometimes we know exactly why feel the way we do, and other times we don’t. I guess if I hadn’t just had my own episode last week, I probably would have shown less empathy. Let us try to be sensitive to others, even when we can’t understand their particular emotion. It might very well be that they are dealing with other things that they themselves can’t explain.
Dear Heavenly Father, help us to be kind to each other. Sometimes we are faced with emotions that we can’t even explain to ourselves. Help us when we see others going through their own situations, that instead of judging, that we try to understand their point of view.